Whatever you do, don’t file your request with the Etymology Department on a Monday morning or a Friday afternoon. You’re bound to be disappointed.

As we all know, the bureaucrats at the U.S. Department of Etymology are a hard-drinking bunch who arrive bleary-eyed on Monday and race out the door on Fridays at 2:30 p.m. sharpish.

All day on Thursdays, our national wordsmiths are giving 110%, assigning names like yellow crested songster and lilac breasted roller to the birds and passion or mango to the fruits. On Friday afternoon, though, they phone it in.

“This bird? Blue. That bird? Black. That flower over is a violet. Are we done yet? Happy hour just started.”

“No, we still need a name for this fruit.”

“That’s an orange.”

“Hey, don’t forget this pepper.”

“Green. Done. Time to party.”

Even worse than the slapdash effort on Friday afternoon, the bureaucrats who come up with these names are demons on Monday mornings, when everyone shows up with a hangover and intense hatred for the week ahead.

You know what got named on a Monday? Kumquats, that’s what. Also platypus, cucumber, squash and vacuum. If you find a word that has at least five letters, plus “U,” it’s a Monday word. They’re ubiquitous.

These decisions have real-life impact, even if it’s invisible to most people. Imagine the embarrassment at all those networking events in the animal kingdom.

“I’m a Madagascar flying orbital squirrel. What kind are you?”

“Gray.”

Frankly, it’s a wonder that some animals get any dates at all.

You wanna know a word that got its name on a Tuesday? Buzz. Great word. Easy to spell. Sounds like its meaning. Yeah, it has a “U” in it, but it’s less than six letters, like hum, which should really be humm, but why quibble with near perfection?

The worst offenders are the college interns, all those library science majors who want to make an impression by inventing creative spellings. They’re the eager beavers who come up with all those words that have extra letters, like the silent “H” in khaki and rhyme and ghost and gherkin and rhubarb. Honestly, it’s exhausting.

At least we’ve escaped the Brits’ insufferable insistence on adding extraneous letters to colour, humour, flavour, and labour. If you ever wondered about the decline of the British Empire, look no further. In the States, we fixed all those pretentious spellings and productivity soared, while the Brits got Spotted Dick and Brexit.

That doesn’t mean we get off without at least a slap on the rist in the States. While we don’t have a Royal Etymologist to screw things up, we do quite nicely with our free-market coinage. The Big Apple, Motor City, Big Easy, and Lost Wages are all Tuesday words. On Friday at 3:30 p.m., we got Frisco, Big D and Chitown.

It’s the same situation with euphemisms, which are quaint inventions that let us call someone a *$%^*)*&%$# without actually needing to say *$%^*)*&%$#. During the middle of the week, we get terms like downsizing, vertically challenged and negative earnings, but on Fridays they don’t even bother to think about it before heading to the tavern.

“Just call this the A-word. This will be the J-word. That’s the Z-word. Enough of this!! It’s five o’clock somewhere.”

How can we repair some of the damage that’s already been done and avoid future catastrophes? As always, I am looking to Millennials to bail us out. Yes, I’m talking about the same people who gave us emojis, but hear me out on this. Besides adding a picture of poop to all their texts and abbreviating everything nmhotwopi*, Millennials also have a powerful disregard for traditional spelling.

I estimate it will be less than three years before tomorrow is tmoro and neighbor is nabr and we’re all texting the deets to our frenz. All the abbreviations will reduce our need for paper, ink, data farms, and electricity. Global warming will reverse itself and the shorter words and sentences will free up an extra hour or two each day for sharing fraudulent memes.

Clearly, it’s time for the Millennials to take charge of this whole wordy thing and for the Feds to “rightsize” the Etymology Department. It’s too late for the platypus, of course, but perhaps there is still hope for tmoro’s anmls.

Meanwhile, it’s time for me to pour myself a brown and chow down on some purples. All this writing can drain my taupe.

Wasn’t it clever of us to explain the asterisked item (nmhotwopi*= no matter how obscure the word or phrase is) in the same place where we beg you to subscribe? Don’t you think this kind of ingenuity deserves a click on this link and signing up for our weekly rants? Uh huh.​​

Every few days, the Commerce Department threatens to send armed thugs to my apartment to torture me, unless I give in to their demands for my most intimate secrets.

Okay, they didn’t say “armed thugs” exactly, but you know how those jackbooted government agents get, um, overly enthusiastic in their missions. It will all start out nice and friendly, but then I’ll hesitate just a bit too long when they ask about my outhouse and…bam.

In the latest installment of our charmed lives, the Census Bureau selected Jill and me to take part in the American Community Survey, a seriously intrusive census given only to the elitest of the elite. Technically, it is our apartment that is the real honoree and we are just “the resident of,” but why quibble when the fickle finger beckons you to determine the future of the nation?

While the decennial census gets all the hype, the people who fill out the ACS are the real power brokers in the US of A. The regular census next year will ask a few basic questions, but the ACS does all the heavy lifting, including:

Do we use wood or coal to heat our condo?

Did I take a day off from work last week?

What was the value of agricultural goods we sold from our home in the past 12 months?

Do we speak English good?

Do we have serious difficulty remembering things?

Do we have serious difficulty remembering things?

The questions kept coming for more than a dozen pages, although my confidence in the entire process took a nosedive at question four, where they asked me for both my date of birth and my age. If they cannot figure out my age from my birth date, the Census Bureau needs a more powerful computer, or a pocket calculator.

Still, we trudged on, describing our condo fees and our internet service and whether we had gotten married or divorced, or both, in the past twelve months. As we worked our way through the labrynthe, though, the reasoning behind the questions got curiouser and curiouser.

Why do they bother to ask if we have indoor plumbing when they already know that 99.5% of households are so equipped? Why do they ask if we can both make and receive a phone call in our apartment? Perhaps there are phones that only receive calls but cannot make them, or vice versa. Why do they ask about babies born to women aged 15-50, but ignore births to females outside that range?

By the time we finished this hours-long exercise, I couldn’t help but think there’s a better way to collect this information. Perhaps, for example, they might buy all of it (and more!!!!) from Facebook or Google—if only they could convince those companies to make our private info available to outsiders.

Worse, I can’t believe these are the most meaningful questions for identifying status and trends across the nation. Many questions seemed to be continuations of past inquiries, but newer shifts appear to be unaddressed.

For example, the survey includes a ton of questions about commuting, including the time people leave for work, how many people are in the vehicle and how long the commute takes, but they don’t ask about ride-share usage or Divvy bikes or whether people have changed jobs or moved in order to reduce their commuting time.

Similarly, we’re bombarded by various stories about the growth and size of the gig economy, but the ACS doesn’t delve into that topic. I didn’t find, for example, a question about whether I have more than one job.

Ditto for the kind of business where I work. While we live in a service economy, the boxes for “type of business” include manufacturing, wholesale trade, retail trade and “other.” I can’t help but wonder if 70% of us aren’t in the “other” box.

Jill and I trudged through the pages, but I became increasingly convinced that the project included too many vague questions and too much guesswork to be definitive. As I struggled to recall whether I worked for money last month or the month before, a visit from those armed thugs started looking better and better.

Still, we persevered and completed the assignment, because that’s what true patriotic Americans do. And, on the upside, this whole process made our income tax forms look much simpler than they did before.

Even better, my self-esteem grew dramatically as I realized I could come up with a more relevant series of questions than all the people at the Census Bureau. Stay tuned for a preview in next week’s post.

All of America is on tenterhooks, wondering “What Would Dadwrites Ask?” if we were running the Census Bureau. Be sure to receive your update, along with all our incredibly wise and beneficent screeds, by subscribing to dadwrites.com. Just click HERE (No, not here. Back there.)

​The mysteries of business meetings, thriving on jargon, and the most thankless job in the world are all top of mind this week, among other cautionary tales…

If I've spent an hour coming to your meeting, don't burn up another hour on items that I could have read in advance. We don't need to be face to face if all we're doing is reading emails.

And while we’re on the subject of meetings from hell, why is it that the most important person in any meeting is the one who arrives 20 minutes late? How else can we explain the organizer's choice to stop the meeting and review everything that was already covered by the people who showed up on time?

I’ve become quite expert at pushing the envelope and thinking outside the box and checking all the boxes and pursuing my passion and shifting my paradigms and giving it 110 percent. Can I take a nap now?

Most networking is a hundred people facing each other in a room and pushing cards at whoever is closest. It's a lot like the old commodity trading pits, except nobody makes any money.

Every so often, I’ll meet someone who calls himself a “serial entrepreneur,” which usually means he has started several companies, achieved some success with one of them, and is still trying to repeat his big win. In comparison, you have to be successful every time to be called a serial killer. Life is so unfair.

The most thankless job in the world is serving on a condo board.

Never show anyone how to do anything, ever. Once you demonstrate that you can do it, other people will decide they don’t need to learn it and they’ll want to rely on you the rest of your life.

I always envisioned myself as the quarterback of my team, but most days I was really the goalie.

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Lots of strange thoughts pop into my head while I’m listening carefully to the menu options that have changed. Submitted this week for your consideration…

I just got a phone call from a 500-pound gorilla. He says he's fed up with the fat shaming and the next guy who mentions his weight is going to get stomped.

I was just digging into my to-do pile and found a story from 2014 (don't judge me) about the level of political division on social media. Ah, those really were the good old days.

Overheard on the street: “My husband has children but I don’t.” Doesn’t that make you feel really bad for those kids?

One big problem with studying to be a suicide bomber is that the class reunions are so small.

The only people we should be allowed to mock online are the Amish, since they won’t be reading it and they won’t be offended. (Unless you think this was a terribly insensitive statement, in which case I was hacked.)

Whenever I fly over a city, I wonder why they put it at that specific site. Yeah, it's on the river, but why at that particular spot? Was there a strategy, or is this just where the mule died?

I’m always intrigued when I drive past a deer crossing. Deer can read?

My friends are so nice that they always sugarcoat it when I ask them to critique my work. I really need to befriend a sadist or two.

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The real key to a long life, wearing out my Fitbit, and a few new rules that you won’t hear about on Bill Maher’s show, among the lessons learned this week...

We need a new rule that you are prohibited from writing a guide to parenthood until your own kids graduate, get jobs, move out, support themselves (legally) and are still willing to talk to you. Otherwise, you sound like one of those daredevils whose last words are, “Watch this.”

There are two times in your life when people will call you a young man. The first is when you're a teenager getting lectured, and later, when people think you are really, really, really, really, really old. I am dreading the day when someone calls me spry.

My favorite aerobic exercise is walking into the kitchen and forgetting why I am there, then walking back to the last room I was in so I can look for clues about why I went to the kitchen. Last weekend, I retraced my steps so many times that my Fitbit melted.

I needed some new pants, but I decided to wait until I lost some weight. But now that I lost some weight, I don't want to get new pants, because they won't fit if I gain back the weight I lost. How many retail stores will go out of business while I am making up my mind?

I’ve discovered that the key to a long life is not to inhale and exhale. It’s to exhale and inhale.

Do people still collect stamps and coins and baseball cards and Beanie Babies? Because I have a ton of verrrry valuable items I might be willing to part with for the right price.

We need a rule that you cannot call something a comedy if it includes child molesting, rape or incest. Adding adjectives like “black,” “tragic” or “dark” to the description doesn’t change things. I'll make an exception for Book of Mormon, but that's the only one.

Book titles are increasing in length at an alarming rate. I ended up with 16 words for Six Tires, No Plan,but more recent titles are long enough to qualify as manifestos. We need a new rule: After you get more than 30 words on the cover, whatever is inside is categorized as a sequel.

We finally decided to get a second car after living as a one-car household for more than five years, diving deeply into the brave new world of computers perched on radial tires. Ten months later, I am almost done with the owner’s manual and, maybe, I will be ready to drive this thing before the lease runs out.

As you might expect, the car has sensors that beep when someone is walking behind the car or when we’re getting too close to the car in front of us, when there’s something in our blind spot and when we’re about to hit a shopping cart in the parking lot. All the new technology is very cool, and very, very noisy.

Still, most of these features fall into the category of nice-to-have, not essential. What I really need isn’t in the car, yet, but the automaker who delivers on my must-haves will earn a customer for life. For instance, I absolutely need…

A transmitter that is activatedwhen my sensors detect a person walking across the street, against the light, staring into a cellphone. My transmitter would light up the pedestrian’s cell phone with an image of my car rolling up on them, so the last thing they ever see is the thing they should have seen in order to make it not be the last thing they ever saw.

Remote-control parking assist for the Uber driver who’s weaving across two lanes at three miles per hour, trying to figure out whether the people with suitcases who are waving to him frantically are, in fact, his airport fare. I would do him and everyone else the service of getting his car parked safely and re-opening the street for the rest of us.

A texting app that sends extremely crude photos into the text stream of the guy who’s still stopped at the green light, sending what must be an urgent message to Domino’s. And, at the end of slipping that text onto the offender’s screen, my app forwards it to his contact list.

Accelerator engagement for the guy going half the limit in the express lane. If my car can slow down automatically when I get too close to the car ahead of me, why can’t I force those dawdlers to move faster? I spend way too much time behind drivers who really, really don’t want to get to their destinations.

Ejector seats. Yes, you can only use it once and it costs a ton to replace it, but aren’t there times when you’re stuck in traffic for 11 hours and you’re hearing the same story for the 19th time and it would be so, so worth it?

Montana license plates that drop down over my Illinois plates whenever my airbags are deployed. Really, I have to explain this one?

Beyond these innovative accessories, consumers will clamor for my soon-to-be-patented water cannons and poop blasters. This is a gold mine for the first car company to compensate me for my brilliance.

​The biggest problem with technology is that it’s developed by people who don’t get out much. Spend enough years on the road with crazy people, though, and the horizons expand astronomically.

Who writes this stuff?

Dadwrites oozes from the warped mind of Michael Rosenbaum, an award-winning author who spends most of his time these days as a start-up business mentor, book coach, photographer and, mostly, a grandfather. All views are his alone, largely due to the fact that he can’t find anyone who agrees with him.